tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1438289051411770399.post4783806627069564495..comments2024-03-25T08:59:38.714-06:00Comments on ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: The Secret Life of Plants at PrincetonTimothy Mortonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05067377804366363020noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1438289051411770399.post-4326619203974898562013-03-28T12:32:34.132-06:002013-03-28T12:32:34.132-06:00Do you think this will be podcast? I am so longin...Do you think this will be podcast? I am so longing to go, but cannot make it down there on that day...<br />THank you<br />Jane Marsching <br />janemarsching.comJaneMhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04841518933904355229noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1438289051411770399.post-62589290951861185772013-02-18T05:05:06.389-06:002013-02-18T05:05:06.389-06:00There is one important leap that has yet to be mad...There is one important leap that has yet to be made, I think, in justifying the frequent use of cybernetic, algorithmic, rhizomatic, pretentious quasi-automata images, and that is the presupposition that "code" is binary. <br /><br />N. Katherine Hayles' excellent text My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts is of great use here. Hayles demonstrates how Lacan (via John Johnston's analysis) and Deleuze and Guattari are basing their view of the unconscious and of the rhizome and Body of Organs on cybernetics and two-dimensional cellular automata -- "The Regime of Computation" as she calls it. <br /><br />Hayles herself, though, frequently betrays her presupposition that "code" has a causal materiality that is necessarily binary -- "flickering voltages." While she applauds Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari (on one side), along with Stephen Wolfram (on the other), for declaring the uselessness of linear causality chains in modeling the world, she nevertheless attributes to the Regime of Computation a causal mechanism of binary software that I am quite sure is temporary, and not contemporary.<br /><br />I take the view -- based on my interaction with scientists in Japan -- that the Regime of Computation is only temporarily based on binary code. <br />What happens when artificial intelligence, machine learning, and materials science converge with quantum biology? When our machines more closely mimic living organisms (e.g. paramecium) than "computers"? How will we theorize with new hardware platforms that "touch nature" in a category-breaching fashion? <br /><br />Self-assembling, massively-parallel, multi-level, error-correcting supramolecular "nano brains" whose tensors and matrices switch states simultaneously on three or six frequency bands -- e.g. megaHertz, kiloHertz, teraHertz -- does that sound like the cybernetic hardware we've known for the past 60 years?<br /><br />What happens to Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari when our best analytic models are no longer based on two-dimensional cellular automata patterns like the Glider?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com